How hard is it to create a website to help people get health insurance under the Affordable Care Act ?

For three 20-year-old programmers in San Francisco , it took about three days ' worth of work .

Spurred by the problems that have surrounded the rollout of the official HeathCare.gov site , the trio created an alternative , Health Sherpa , quickly and cheaply . At first glance , it looks like a triumph of tech-startup nimbleness over government inefficiency .

George Kalogeropoulos , who created the site along with Ning Liang and Michael Wasser , said all three of them had tried using the government website to get insurance .

`` We were surprised to see that it was actually fairly difficult to use HealthCare.gov to find and understand our options , '' he told CNN . `` Given that the data was publicly available , we thought that it made a lot of sense to take the data that was on there and just make it easy to search through and view available plans . ''

The result is a bare-bones site that lets users enter their zip code , plus details about their family and income , to find suggested plans in their area .

`` The Health Sherpa is a free guide that makes it easier to find and sign up for health insurance under the Affordable Care Act . We only use carefully vetted , publicly available data , '' the site reads . `` The Health Sherpa is not affiliated with any lobby , trade group or government agency and has no political agenda . ''

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The Sherpa are an ethnic group in Nepal , some of whom have long served as guides for people climbing Mount Everest and other mountains in the Himalayas . The name has come to be used generically for any kind of guide or mentor .

Of course , it 's not fair to compare the creation of Health Sherpa to the rollout of the more complicated government ACA site , which everyone from President Obama on down has acknowledged as a horribly botched affair .

For one , you ca n't actually use Heath Sherpa to sign up for coverage . The site states that it 's for research purposes only , and that users must verify the premiums and subsidies they find there with state health care exchanges , insurance companies or on HealthCare.gov itself .

`` It is n't a fair apples-to-apples comparison , '' Kalogeropoulos said . `` Unlike Healthcare.gov , our site does n't connect to the IRS , DHS , and various state exchanges and authorities . Furthermore , we 're using the government 's data , so our site is only possible because of the hard work that the Healthcare.gov team has done . ''

But it does cast light on the difference between what can be done by a small group of experts , steeped in Silicon Valley 's anything-is-possible mentality , and a massive government project in which politics and bureaucracy seem to have helped create an unwieldy mess .

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Creating the original Sherpa site took three days and cost `` several hundred dollars , '' according to Kalogeropoulos . The three programmers have continued fine-tuning the site as its popularity has grown . In less than a week , the site has had almost 200,000 unique visitors and over half a million page views , he said .

`` We 've heard from people of all ages and walks of life , and thousands of people have reached out to us directly via email , phone , and Twitter to thank us to and to suggest features and request improvements , '' he said . `` Tens of thousands of people have clicked through to buy a specific plan , suggesting that we are achieving our goal : helping people find a health insurance plan . ''

Maybe the Obama administration can learn from the Sherpa example . As it scrambles to fix the heath care site , the government has sought to inject a little more Silicon Valley into the process by enlisting a `` Tech Surge '' of staffers from Oracle and Red Hat , as well as Michael Dickerson , a site reliability engineer on leave from Google .

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Three 20-year-olds create alternate site that lets people search for health care

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Programmers built Health Sherpa in three days for `` hundreds of dollars ''

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Site does not let users actually sign up for coverage

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It was built in response to problems that have plagued Healthcare.gov site